Saturday, November 16, 2002

For the first time, I encountered a Health Partners physician that I did not trust or like.    I took my son to the urgent care clinic to see if he had an ear infection.  The doctor took one look at his eyes, which had suddenly become kind of watery, and said, "he's got the beginning of pink-eye, here's a prescription for antibiotics."    Infectious conjuntivitis (pink eye)  can be caused by a virus or a bacteria.  I asked her about this.  She said they pre-emptively treat anything that looks like pink eye with antibiotics because the viral kind is untreatable anyway and has to go away on its own. This kind of matches what other hospitals say.  I asked her about bacterial resistance and she said that resistant bacteria are only caused by oral antibiotics.  ~!  This is not so!  I can create bacterial resistance in a petri dish in my basement.  The eye is a perfect petri dish.   I looked up pink-eye at the St. Luke's Eye Clinic. When she checked Frank's ears, she was acting all huffy about him being scared of the otoscope.  I can understand this.  I get huffy too after a long day of dealing with cranky children.  If I was getting paid for it, I would fake a cheery attitude. Then, she used her computer system to send the prescription to another clinic all the way across town so the pharmacy asked me to wait while they sorted out the mess.  A voice in my head was telling me to leave without getting the prescription so I did.  We can watch his eyes and if they start to look red, we can go get the prescription.  5:34:30 AM    comment []

"A double standard has emerged here. Not even the War on Terror is sufficient to cause Congress or the White House to curtail the privacy of gun owners, or to close the loopholes in our gun laws that terrorists exploit to arm themselves. " Thank you, John Ashcroft, for exposing the war on terror as total bullshit.   It may help to know about the mythology that motivates the gun nuts.  Your average gun nut nurtures a fantasy in which the established order is upset and they have to use their guns to survive.  For example, some kind of nefarious force takes over the American government and begins to take away our freedoms.  The gun nuts rise up to save the day and in return are exalted.  This fantasy, like the similar fantasies nurtured by revolutionary communists, fundamentalist Christians, and radical islamists stems from the frustrations of trying to negotiate our meritocracy with inferior intellects and organizational skills.   It is very seductive to imagine the day when the rules that bind us to our pathetic existence are nullified and we can run amok and realize the potential of our animal natures, punish those who have succeeded where we have failed, and take the women with the crunchy thighs. 4:57:06 AM    comment []